Having been involved with a few online poetry workshops for the past four years, I can think of exactly one poem posted online which I would venture to say was a truly outstanding poem. That isn't to say there aren't others, or that I haven't read others, it's only to say that I can think of only one at this point in time. Every once in a great while someone posts a poem to one of these forums which receives a great amount of praise; but in almost every case the excitement does down, the poem crawls down the board and slips quietly into oblivion.
I think it's possible that a poem which strikes a chord in readers almost immediately will end up going the way of the dodo bird when all the fanfare quiets down. It could be that a poem that is rewarding at first sight is at risk of not being revisited over and over by a great number of readers. I think the poems that truly become a part of us, as any outstanding poem will inevitably do, are those that take their sweet time unfolding themselves to us. They may have even looked awkward and ugly when we first read them. I wonder how Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream" would fare if it appeared in a poetry forum today? I sincerely doubt that it would be met with a barage of flattery. That particular poem became a part of me for two reasons: one, because not understanding it forced me to read it a hundred plus times over the course of the years; and two, because Stevens had a great ear and such a coy, seductive style.
That isn't to say an outstanding poem has to be mysterious. Take Robinson's "Richard Cory", for instance. I probably read that poem fifty times before I realized just how good it was. I probably "got" it early on. I mean, it's about as subtle as a punch in the throat; but some things you just don't really "get" when you're eighteen or nineteen. Robinson's poem can be appreciated at first reading but in a certain sense it can't be fully taken in until one has lived long enough. I love how the ideas are set against eachother in Robinson's poem: that we ought to appreciate what we have, a simple and ordinary plaitude which is suddenly rendered flimsy and trite when followed by the somewhat existential and fearsome thought that we might not ever be happy with what we have.
It's obvious that poems about death will have more impact than poems about, say, fishing or sex. Louise Gluck finishes one of her poems with the line: "The love of form is a love of endings." This line has more and more meaning for me the older I get. Someone once said, "everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian". Absolutism of any kind is anathema nowadays and saying this kind of thing wouldn't go over very well with most people, but I believe it's essentially true. I think Gluck's line rests pretty squarely in the Aristotelian camp, in that it's a nod to the theory of art in the Western tradition. There has been, of course, a huge shift away from this time-honored tradition to the point that art no longer requires any formal structure whatsoever, need not be linear or coherent in any way, and in some cases doesn't even have to make sense or mean anything at all.
As much as I flirt with the exciting possibilities that modernism and/or post modernism seems to offer, I think I'm strongly rooted in the Aristotelian camp myself, in that I think poems ought to have a point to make, a view to share, an experience to offer. To however remote a degree, most poetry, if it can be called that, will have some association with death and dying, and it will have this association due to it's having a beginning, a middle, and an end. We can bypass this by beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, after a journey through nowhere, but we only do so at the risk of wasting our own time and the reader's time as well.
I think Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" is a good example of an outstanding poem. Certainly this seems to be the common view. But I wonder now if I haven't been taking it all wrong? As usual with me, I seem to approach the poem as I do most everything else: ass backwards. What I mean is, I never come away from the poem without thinking that its subject is deserving of the utmost respect. I am simply unable to view the gunner as a helpless victim of the State who somehow inadvertently and tragically wound up manning the guns in a ball-turret on a bomber plane. To take this view, in my humble opinion, would be a concession to everything that is rotten and misleading about determinism. But when I examine Jarrell's poem and read some of the noteworthy commentary about it online, I see that this view could very well be the one which Jarrell actually intended for the reader to take.
The gunner falls from his mother into the State, as if his entire life in between his birth and becoming a combat fighter is irrelevant. In fact, the poem erases this entire period, and so what we have is a person with virtually no name, no real identity; a person who made no choices at all and is merely a marionette being played upon by external forces, primarily, in this case, the big evil force of the State. Actually, I always had trouble with that word for this poem. It blanks out the very crucial and relevant fact that the Allied forces during WWII were at war against what was arguably the most powerful and dangerous manifestations of collectivism ever known. They were at war against Statism itself (I don't mean to sound like a flag-waver and I'm certainly not trying to stir up any kind of nationalistic fervor in my fellow Americans. For the record I think our current war is an absurdity and our current President a theocratic, crusading jack-ass. I do have respect for the U.S. soldiers themselves, however).
By depicting his gunner as a helpless pawn of the State Jarrell is guilty of a huge historical and philosophical error; but nonetheless his poem forced me, over time, to come to terms with exactly what a ball turret is and with the brute fact that human beings who were sometimes not even out their teens had the sheer balls to crawl into one of those things and stay there, in combat, for as long as nine hours at a time, in sometimes below freezing temperatures, cramped into a fetal position and skillfully operating equipment, and all the time risking death and very often meeting their deaths. Nothing I have ever done in my life up to this point has been anywhere near as dignified and honorable as cramming into a ball turret of a bomber plane and flying into combat in defense of human rights and political freedom. At this point in time I would no sooner be able to do that than to loose a flock of geese from my rear-end. Perhaps when I was younger, and if circumstances were drastically different... I don't know. I'll flatter myself with that thought for a while, even though I know it won't last.
And what of that whopping final line? To me it has always pointed to the ultimate tragedy of war, and to what seems at first glance as a complete waste of a human life. But isn't it shamefully ungrateful, at least for some of us, to regard Jarrell's dead gunner as a faceless pawn of a military machine who served no greater purpose than to be washed out of a ball turret with a hose? I think it is. Doesn't that final line trivialize the debt a great many of us owe to people like him, and to the fact that millions of people honor his memory to this day? I think maybe it does.
I can't say that I wish the poem had never been written, though I do wish it had been written differently. The poem is certainly outstanding, but maybe it's outstanding for the wrong reasons?
I think it's possible that a poem which strikes a chord in readers almost immediately will end up going the way of the dodo bird when all the fanfare quiets down. It could be that a poem that is rewarding at first sight is at risk of not being revisited over and over by a great number of readers. I think the poems that truly become a part of us, as any outstanding poem will inevitably do, are those that take their sweet time unfolding themselves to us. They may have even looked awkward and ugly when we first read them. I wonder how Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream" would fare if it appeared in a poetry forum today? I sincerely doubt that it would be met with a barage of flattery. That particular poem became a part of me for two reasons: one, because not understanding it forced me to read it a hundred plus times over the course of the years; and two, because Stevens had a great ear and such a coy, seductive style.
That isn't to say an outstanding poem has to be mysterious. Take Robinson's "Richard Cory", for instance. I probably read that poem fifty times before I realized just how good it was. I probably "got" it early on. I mean, it's about as subtle as a punch in the throat; but some things you just don't really "get" when you're eighteen or nineteen. Robinson's poem can be appreciated at first reading but in a certain sense it can't be fully taken in until one has lived long enough. I love how the ideas are set against eachother in Robinson's poem: that we ought to appreciate what we have, a simple and ordinary plaitude which is suddenly rendered flimsy and trite when followed by the somewhat existential and fearsome thought that we might not ever be happy with what we have.
It's obvious that poems about death will have more impact than poems about, say, fishing or sex. Louise Gluck finishes one of her poems with the line: "The love of form is a love of endings." This line has more and more meaning for me the older I get. Someone once said, "everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian". Absolutism of any kind is anathema nowadays and saying this kind of thing wouldn't go over very well with most people, but I believe it's essentially true. I think Gluck's line rests pretty squarely in the Aristotelian camp, in that it's a nod to the theory of art in the Western tradition. There has been, of course, a huge shift away from this time-honored tradition to the point that art no longer requires any formal structure whatsoever, need not be linear or coherent in any way, and in some cases doesn't even have to make sense or mean anything at all.
As much as I flirt with the exciting possibilities that modernism and/or post modernism seems to offer, I think I'm strongly rooted in the Aristotelian camp myself, in that I think poems ought to have a point to make, a view to share, an experience to offer. To however remote a degree, most poetry, if it can be called that, will have some association with death and dying, and it will have this association due to it's having a beginning, a middle, and an end. We can bypass this by beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, after a journey through nowhere, but we only do so at the risk of wasting our own time and the reader's time as well.
I think Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" is a good example of an outstanding poem. Certainly this seems to be the common view. But I wonder now if I haven't been taking it all wrong? As usual with me, I seem to approach the poem as I do most everything else: ass backwards. What I mean is, I never come away from the poem without thinking that its subject is deserving of the utmost respect. I am simply unable to view the gunner as a helpless victim of the State who somehow inadvertently and tragically wound up manning the guns in a ball-turret on a bomber plane. To take this view, in my humble opinion, would be a concession to everything that is rotten and misleading about determinism. But when I examine Jarrell's poem and read some of the noteworthy commentary about it online, I see that this view could very well be the one which Jarrell actually intended for the reader to take.
The gunner falls from his mother into the State, as if his entire life in between his birth and becoming a combat fighter is irrelevant. In fact, the poem erases this entire period, and so what we have is a person with virtually no name, no real identity; a person who made no choices at all and is merely a marionette being played upon by external forces, primarily, in this case, the big evil force of the State. Actually, I always had trouble with that word for this poem. It blanks out the very crucial and relevant fact that the Allied forces during WWII were at war against what was arguably the most powerful and dangerous manifestations of collectivism ever known. They were at war against Statism itself (I don't mean to sound like a flag-waver and I'm certainly not trying to stir up any kind of nationalistic fervor in my fellow Americans. For the record I think our current war is an absurdity and our current President a theocratic, crusading jack-ass. I do have respect for the U.S. soldiers themselves, however).
By depicting his gunner as a helpless pawn of the State Jarrell is guilty of a huge historical and philosophical error; but nonetheless his poem forced me, over time, to come to terms with exactly what a ball turret is and with the brute fact that human beings who were sometimes not even out their teens had the sheer balls to crawl into one of those things and stay there, in combat, for as long as nine hours at a time, in sometimes below freezing temperatures, cramped into a fetal position and skillfully operating equipment, and all the time risking death and very often meeting their deaths. Nothing I have ever done in my life up to this point has been anywhere near as dignified and honorable as cramming into a ball turret of a bomber plane and flying into combat in defense of human rights and political freedom. At this point in time I would no sooner be able to do that than to loose a flock of geese from my rear-end. Perhaps when I was younger, and if circumstances were drastically different... I don't know. I'll flatter myself with that thought for a while, even though I know it won't last.
And what of that whopping final line? To me it has always pointed to the ultimate tragedy of war, and to what seems at first glance as a complete waste of a human life. But isn't it shamefully ungrateful, at least for some of us, to regard Jarrell's dead gunner as a faceless pawn of a military machine who served no greater purpose than to be washed out of a ball turret with a hose? I think it is. Doesn't that final line trivialize the debt a great many of us owe to people like him, and to the fact that millions of people honor his memory to this day? I think maybe it does.
I can't say that I wish the poem had never been written, though I do wish it had been written differently. The poem is certainly outstanding, but maybe it's outstanding for the wrong reasons?
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